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By Matthieu, 2010-01-07 23:06

Unfortunately my blog has been the victim of neglect lately. I have a few posts that have been saved as “drafts” and were never published. Over the next little while I’ll be cleaning those up and publishing them, and posting links to them here.

Workout and Yorkdale

Christmas cheer

Apple Service

Also, I just did a clean install of WordPress and reimported all content. So if anything is broken, let me know.

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By Matthieu, 2010-01-07 12:54

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/how-do-you-properly-install-a-novatel-turbo-stick-usb-modem-773492/

I used Network MAnager “Mobile Broadband” and entered the APN (“inet.bell.ca”) instead.

These are the important steps:

Step 1:
Connecting the device, it starts as a usb-storage device but at this point the device has the idVendor: 0x1410 and idProduct: 0x5010, Ubuntu recognizes and mounts the device automatically and puts the icon on the desktop

Step 2:
Right-click on the mounted icon named “Mobile Connect” and select Eject, now the device will change its idProduct id from 0x5010 to the more re-assuring 0x7030 but somehow Ubuntu doesn’t know it’s supposed to be a usbserial device…

Step 3:
sudo rmmod usbserial
sudo modprobe usbserial vendor=0x1410 product=0x7030
and /dev/ttyUSB0, /dev/ttyUSB1 etc.. up to /dev/ttyUSB5 should appear on your file system.

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By Matthieu, 2010-01-06 09:58

With all the new 3G cell technologies and phones, it’s kind of confusing to figure out which phones work on which networks. For example, the new Nokia N900 will not work on the Bell or Rogers 3G networks.

Fortunately, Wikipedia, as usual, has the answer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Deployed_UMTS_networks

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By Matthieu, 2010-01-05 13:56

http://windowsconnected.com/forums/t/1050.aspx

After the release of Windows XP Service Pack 2 Microsoft began doing software updates in a new way.  They now maintain two different development environments a General Distribution Releases (GDR) and Quick Fix Engineering (QFE) that only converge again at Service Pack levels.

The GDR branch of updates are used when Microsoft issues one of the following types of updates: security updates, critical updates, updates, update rollups, drivers and feature packs.  This branch does not include the updates from the QFE branch.

The QFE branch are cummulative hotfixes issued by Microsoft Product Support Services to address specific customer issues. These updates do not get the same quality of testing as the GDR branch.

GDR-class fixes are included in hotfix files, but hotfixes are not included in GDR version files. The GDR and hotfix versions of a particular file in a security update, critical update, update, update rollup, driver, or feature pack package will typically have the same version numbers. If the version numbers are different then the hotfix file will have a later version number. This indicates that the hotfix file includes a hotfix that was created after the GDR-class fix.

When a security update, critical update, update, update rollup, driver, or feature pack installs you will automatically get the correct “branch” based on your current file type (GDP or QFE). Additionally if you install the GDR version files, the hotfix files are also copied to the %windir%\$hf_mig$ folder. This supports migration to the appropriate files if you later install a hotfix or service pack that includes earlier versions of these files.

Sometimes, you will need to force the installation of the GDR package only or of the QFE package only. To do this, use the following command-line switches.

To install the GDR package only, use /B:RTMGDR

To install the QFE package only, use /B:RTMQFE

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By Matthieu, 2009-12-31 12:31

Yesterday I installed Wine 1.1 on my Mac using MacPorts. It works great, however it’s not as well integrated as wine on Linux or CrossOver on Mac. What I mean by this is that it’s not possible to double-click a Windows EXE and have it open with wine. So I made a quick and dirty app using Platypus (http://www.sveinbjorn.org/platypus) to allow me to launch Windows executables directly from Finder.
WineLauncherOSX

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By Matthieu, 2009-12-30 18:19

I was browsing Facebook today and glanced up at the usually useless “Suggestions” box. For the first time, I saw something interesting. My cousin in France had become a fan of “Weblib”.

Intrigued, I clicked the link. It seems like a pretty interesting concept. To quote their website: “Besoin d’aller sur Internet? Pas d’ordinateur? Weblib vous en prete un gratuitement.” For all you English-speakers, that means “Need to use the Internet? No computer? Weblib will lend you one for free.”

I think that speaks for itself. Not sure what their business model is, but I hope it works, and perhaps we’ll have something of the sort in Canada soon!.

http://www.weblib.eu/

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By Matthieu, 2009-12-22 10:42

Today I booted up my Windows Server 2003 laptop. All seemed OK, but I couldn’t get an IP address on my wired connection and my wireless card didn’t detect any APs. I thought i would have to reimage my machine, but a quick google brought up this page:

Tech Support Guy Forums – View Single Post – Solved: Wireless networks detected – no wireless networks found.

In a command prompt window,
Reset TCP/IP stack to installation defaults, type: netsh int ip reset reset.log

Reset WINSOCK entries to installation defaults, type: netsh winsock reset catalog

And it works!

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By Matthieu, 2009-12-18 21:37

for more, see http://oldcomputers.net/oldads/

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By Matthieu, 2009-12-18 19:55

matthieu@localhost:~$ fortune
LOVE:
 When you like to think of someone on days that begin with a morning.
LOVE:
	When it's growing, you don't mind watering it with a few tears.
LOVE:
 When, if asked to choose between your lover
 and happiness, you'd skip happiness in a heartbeat.
LOVE:
 When you don't want someone too close--
 because you're very sensitive to pleasure.

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By Matthieu, 2009-12-18 11:39

http://trac.adium.im/ticket/6569

XSLT could be used to transform the .chatlog files to HTML. Attached is an XSLT stylesheet that I have written to do this. The libxslt library is present on all versions of Mac OS X since 10.2, and its command-line tool can be invoked in a sub-shell using system(3):

xsltproc -o 'foobar (2007-03-08T09.19.11-0700).html' format-html.xsl \
            'foobar (2007-03-08T09.19.11-0700).chatlog'